Can you tell which thing is not like the other?

I am continuing a series of reflections on Short-Term Missions and how they can be an effective part of a truly transforming church.  Taking up the conversation in a series of articles by CT, two posts ago, I asked you to consider which of the following Short Term Mission scenarios is not like the other and why.

1. A church has a tradition of taking its high school students to Mexico with a para-church ministry to build houses in a kind of Holy Spring Break.
2. A small group of medical professionals travel to the Philippines to run a week’s worth of medical clinics in poor slums.
3. Volunteers join in rebuilding efforts after a disaster in a third-world country.
4. A church sends a group of members to the same village in Africa ten years in a row, the ministry they do differing depending on the needs of the villagers.

So, (drum roll please)…the answer is #4. 

All of the mission trip scenarios are good and noble activities.  Even honoring to God, I’d say, and certainly well-worth doing.  Please don’t hear any implied criticism of the motivations or activities in any of these types of mission trips.  I’d encourage any of my church members to take part in any of them. 

But #4 is the only one that has built into its organization the crucial element that Ver Beek and Priest say is essential to insuring that mission trips truly transform: ongoing committed relationships.

Relationships within the team members (they are all from the same church) and relationships between the church sending the team and the village that has received them for ten years in a row.  And implied in the phrase “the ministry they do differing depending on the needs of the villagers” is a kind of relationship where the sending team is more interested in genuinely serving the needs, goals and intentions of the villagers than having any agenda of their own. 

In scenario #4, mission trips are based not on the desire of North American Christians to “do some good for the less fortunate”, but instead to develop relationships and partnerships between the church and the village that will be mutually beneficial, lasting, and responsive to the leadership offered by the villagers (who themselves no more of what they need than well-meaning westerners often admit.)

For mission trips to make a genuine difference, both in the lives of those who go and those who receive the missionaries, the focus must be on more than any adventure to take, task to accomplish, need to meet or good thing to do.  It must be on genuine partnership, growing in discipleship and mutual relationships that encourage the sending church, those who go and those who receive to all be more aware of God’s work in their midst and God’s call on their lives. Priest describes this as teams who return “year after year, slowly building stable, enduring and reciprocal ties.”

Now, while preferring scenario #4 (and indeed, making that scenario the model for both the Y-Malawi project and our church’s increasing forays into missions) I actually want to spend a bit more time arguing for the benefits of scenarios 1-3 and how those kinds of trips could be tweaked to be more truly life-transforming.